Wednesday, August 1, 2012

An Honest Man and a Good Writer

James Baldwin (1924-1987), by Van Vechten, 1955.

"Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was
born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of
his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it. On
the other hand, it is only because the world looks on his talent
with such a frightening indifference that the artist is compelled to
make his talent important. So that any writer, looking back over
even so short a span of time as I am here forced to assess, finds
that the things which hurt him and the things which helped him
cannot be divorced from each other; he could be helped in a
certain way only because he was hurt in a certain way; and his
help is simply to be enabled to move from one conundrum to the
next--one is tempted to say that he moves from one disaster to the
next." --James Baldwin

Read the entire 1952 essay from which this passage has been excerpted by clicking on the link below: